As a result of all of the negative reviews of SimCity, I picked up Cities XL 2012 yesterday. Not bad. Huge maps, single player but you can tie your cities together and trade between them, curved roads. So suck it, EA.

"Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

Even the game's solo, private sandbox mode requires an online connection, which many critics see as EA's attempt to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game, even as EA designers have maintained that the always-online requirement is more of a design choice that persistently connects fans to a global SimCity marketplace and to new game-wide challenges.

Theaetetus:As a result of all of the negative reviews of SimCity, I picked up Cities XL 2012 yesterday. Not bad. Huge maps, single player but you can tie your cities together and trade between them, curved roads. So suck it, EA.

gods I hate Steam. I had a five hour flight with an empty seat next to me and I thought, "time for a little XCom." Nope, no internet connection and Steam seemed to think I needed one to verify my Steam account before I could play the game installed on my system with the DVD in the drive.

now if i play offline there is about a 50-50 chance if Steam will let me play. I don't care if the next game is so fun it is more addictive than the one that braiwashed everyone in the ST:TNG episode. If it requires a Steam account it stays on the shelf.

scottydoesntknow:"Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

Even the game's solo, private sandbox mode requires an online connection, which many critics see as EA's attempt to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game, even as EA designers have maintained that the always-online requirement is more of a design choice that persistently connects fans to a global SimCity marketplace and to new game-wide challenges.

You go to hell EA. You got to hell and you die!

Lots of the game is handled on the servers. The servers do most of the simulation calculations. I can imagine that if people play this enough they may actually cost EA more in servers than they get per customers. They will either cut the servers early pissing off lots of customers, or they will release a true single player mode.

gods I hate Steam. I had a five hour flight with an empty seat next to me and I thought, "time for a little XCom." Nope, no internet connection and Steam seemed to think I needed one to verify my Steam account before I could play the game installed on my system with the DVD in the drive.

now if i play offline there is about a 50-50 chance if Steam will let me play. I don't care if the next game is so fun it is more addictive than the one that braiwashed everyone in the ST:TNG episode. If it requires a Steam account it stays on the shelf.

You go to hell Steam. You go to hell, die and go to double-bad hell.

Had you completely installed and played the game before your flight? You also need to turn off auto-updates one time while you are online. You should be fine from then on.1) Turn off auto-updates2) Play game once before you go offline, it has to validate the first time3) There are a few games that use other DRM as well and do so on the boxed copy, Steam has no control over that.

Despite the problems (and there are a ton) I played SimCity last night on my girlfriend's computer. I was pissed off enough about server issues that I told her I didn't even want to try it, but when it finally came online 4 hours later I played and it was pretty fun. Probably worth about $40, so I'm still debating at $60.

On that topic, I think any time a game has server stabilty problems like this, the company should be forced to refund 25%, 33% or 50% of the price back to every single person who bought the game. Suddenly this problem wouldn't exist anymore.

Why would anyone pay $60 to rent a game? It is only as good as the jackasses who run the servers (and damn near every launch of an "always on" game has shown the people who run them are quite incapable of doing their jobs), and they can shut them off anytime they want to for any reason.

That's why I never bought Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, this game, or any other POS like that. Maybe one day companies like Blizzard and EA will learn, but only after they get their headquarters burned to the ground because the servers got hacked or whatever else and people couldn't play their shiat.

gods I hate Steam. I had a five hour flight with an empty seat next to me and I thought, "time for a little XCom." Nope, no internet connection and Steam seemed to think I needed one to verify my Steam account before I could play the game installed on my system with the DVD in the drive.

now if i play offline there is about a 50-50 chance if Steam will let me play. I don't care if the next game is so fun it is more addictive than the one that braiwashed everyone in the ST:TNG episode. If it requires a Steam account it stays on the shelf.

You go to hell Steam. You go to hell, die and go to double-bad hell.

I like STEAM, which is a pretty common standpoint for a lot of people here, but I can definitely get behind this sentiment, too. "Offline Mode" rarely ever works for me. Generally the case has always been that it for some reason tries to update before it goes into Offline Mode, which if there's no internet connection, that fails and STEAM closes.

Other times it just flat out fails anyway for a myriad of reasons. Even Games for Windows LIVE will let me play my games if it can't connect to the servers!

It's come a long way from its version in 2004, but the STEAM client still has a lot of crappy faults to iron out.

That said, I still enjoy it for having games stored on their servers for me to retrieve, and Steamworks for online play is pretty great. It's just when I don't have an internet connection, STEAM's Offline Mode mysteriously doesn't work.

This is why I don't buy games with always on DRM. Some IT guy farks up or people cut his budget and you can't play the game. The company pisses off 4chan, gets hit with a DDoS, you can't play the game. Someone hacks in to get the credit cards and takes down the DRM servers in the process, you can't play the game. fark that.

Obbi:I like STEAM, which is a pretty common standpoint for a lot of people here, but I can definitely get behind this sentiment, too. "Offline Mode" rarely ever works for me. Generally the case has always been that it for some reason tries to update before it goes into Offline Mode, which if there's no internet connection, that fails and STEAM closes.

FYI, in a lot of cases the game doesn't require Steam to launch, rather the shortcut Steam gave you when it installed the game requires Steam to be on (so you get Steam achievements, the Steam interface, etc). If you go into C:\program files\steam\steamapps\common (or replace common with your windows login in some cases) you can hunt down the exe to launch the game and bypass Steam. Only a few games I own (mostly the Valve ones) actually give a shiat about Steam.

sammyk:You would think EA would know how to do this by now. Seriously. How many on line games do they have in their library? There ready is no excuse

Even Blizzard farked this up when they launched SC2 and Diablo 3. The guys who ran a computing infrastructure for 13 million WoW players still managed to fark it up. Doesn't exactly give me confidence in the general concept.

yeah, even though I have been playing some version of Sim City since '94. I am going to sit this one out. Sorry EA when I want to zone out in my computer zen garden I want to do it alone, not connected to the internets.

Theaetetus:As a result of all of the negative reviews of SimCity, I picked up Cities XL 2012 yesterday. Not bad. Huge maps, single player but you can tie your cities together and trade between them, curved roads. So suck it, EA.

I was pondering this myself. Cities XL Platinum is $30 on Steam right now.

ha-ha-guy:sammyk: You would think EA would know how to do this by now. Seriously. How many on line games do they have in their library? There ready is no excuse

Even Blizzard farked this up when they launched SC2 and Diablo 3. The guys who ran a computing infrastructure for 13 million WoW players still managed to fark it up. Doesn't exactly give me confidence in the general concept.

EA Producer Kip Katserelis:

"We've got experience from Spore and Darkspore," Katserelis said, citing other recent Maxis games. "EA is an on online company. We're definitely watching what's going on at Blizzard, and we're putting in backstops and checks to try to prevent those kind of things from happening."

I think part of the trick for offline steam is to enable offline mode BEFORE you're actually disconnected from the net. When I deployed to Iraq I did it that way and except for periodic "you haven't connected in a really long time, we need to verify you're account" messages I got every 90 days or so I was able to play almost my entire game library offline.

RoxtarRyan:Obbi: MindStalker:Had you completely installed and played the game before your flight? You also need to turn off auto-updates one time while you are online. You should be fine from then on.

Turn off auto-updates, you say? I'll give that a try next time I'm on.

Like he said, run the games you intend to play at least one to ensure they are updated. Next, just click on "Steam" in the upper left hand side, and click "Go Offline".

Easy!

Except when it's not. i had played XCOM a week or so ahead of the trip and still got caught. I've got other things to worry about before a flight than to login to my games ahead of time to make the not-game-important-but-somehow-game-required-software happy. I had no idea about the offline mode. I'll make sure to check that next time, assuming I can get it to launch.

I don't understand this "servers crash at launch" business. I mean, if you're launching a new game with marketing, aren't you expecting a load of people to log on at once? Can't they rent more servers for the first month or two? Isn't this what 'the cloud' is for, anyway?

ha-ha-guy:sammyk: You would think EA would know how to do this by now. Seriously. How many on line games do they have in their library? There ready is no excuse

Even Blizzard farked this up when they launched SC2 and Diablo 3. The guys who ran a computing infrastructure for 13 million WoW players still managed to fark it up. Doesn't exactly give me confidence in the general concept.

I was really thinking about buying this until I saw over 600 one star reviews on Amazon in the first day

MindStalker:scottydoesntknow: "Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

Even the game's solo, private sandbox mode requires an online connection, which many critics see as EA's attempt to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game, even as EA designers have maintained that the always-online requirement is more of a design choice that persistently connects fans to a global SimCity marketplace and to new game-wide challenges.

You go to hell EA. You got to hell and you die!

Lots of the game is handled on the servers. The servers do most of the simulation calculations. I can imagine that if people play this enough they may actually cost EA more in servers than they get per customers. They will either cut the servers early pissing off lots of customers, or they will release a true single player mode.

For the person who mentioned Cities XL, Cities in Motion is also a great title. Think SimCity, but entirely focused on the transit system. Cities in Motion 2 is going to add a full featured city builder into the mix as well. I'm on my phone, but if I wasn't I would link to a YouTube gameplay session with developer commentary.

lucksi:It's sad to see that they still sold so many copies of this DRM ridden crapfest of a game

That seems to be the standard MO now. Release an unfinished, buggy, error-filled game and then see the reaction. If it's hugely negative, release a few quick updates to patch some parts and see how much outrage remains. If it subsides, great you've got all their money and don't have to do shiat past that. If it continues, release another update that fixes a couple more of the glaring issues, then call it done.

Call me an old curmudgeon but I long for the old days where you could buy a game, get it home and be playing it within a minute of hitting the power button.

Now it's: get it home put it in the console and oh hey lookie, the console needs to perform an update before it'll run your game. No worries, it's only 1.5 Gb, shouldn't be more than a half hour then we're good to go! 30 minutes later go to play the game and OH LOOKIE! release day patch because they couldn't be arsed to wait until the game is in a releasable state to put it on shelves. Well, feck, what's another half hour, right? Okay, that's done, it's time to play this mother! BUT not before we make you watch unskippable 15 - 30 second elaborate logo sequences for every. farking. company. involved in the game's creation. No, you can't skip past them, why would you want to? Hey! Finally a title screen! Okay, let's start. Loading...loading...loading...load - you really should have installed this on the console's HDD, it'll only take another 30 minutes and 50% of the available space - ing...loading...Hey, you should really log in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AIM, MySpace, Microsoft Live, Geocities and Google+ to get The Full Game Experience! No? Okay, just a few more minutes of loading...Oh hey, um...our authentication servers are overloaded. Sorry, you can't play, try again in a week. it should be sorted out by then. What? No, you can't play without authenticating! Why wouldn't you want to authenticate? Unless you're a pirate! Thanks for your money though. No, you can't have a refund. Don't ask or we'll ban your account.

scottydoesntknow:"Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

That, and they're just as surprised this time that their servers can't handle the load as they were last time.

tom baker's scarf:I've got other things to worry about before a flight than to login to my games ahead of time to make the not-game-important-but-somehow-game-required-software happy. I had no idea about the offline mode.

I'd check it myself for ya right now, but don't think there are any games that I have that phone home to have that disabled... :/

Dr Dreidel:scottydoesntknow: "Due to the high demand for SimCity, Origin has experienced some delays that have impacted a small percentage of users. The team has been working non-stop to resolve. We are also making changes to prevent further issues, and we're confident that the Origin service will be stable for our International SimCity launches later this week."

I hate this farking excuse. Every time this happens they basically blame the fans. "If so many of y'all hadn't purchased it, everything would be working fine." Pre-orders alone should've given them some clue it was going to be big.

That, and they're just as surprised this time that their servers can't handle the load as they were last time.

Considering what we did with their servers during both betas, Im really surprised they got caught with their pants down on this. Wait, no I'm not, its EA.

Bullseyed:Despite the problems (and there are a ton) I played SimCity last night on my girlfriend's computer. I was pissed off enough about server issues that I told her I didn't even want to try it, but when it finally came online 4 hours later I played and it was pretty fun. Probably worth about $40, so I'm still debating at $60.

On that topic, I think any time a game has server stabilty problems like this, the company should be forced to refund 25%, 33% or 50% of the price back to every single person who bought the game. Suddenly this problem wouldn't exist anymore.

yeah, but see that would require consumer protection laws to actually be effective or for those affected to actually make a concerted effort to get results.